It's free enough for most hobbyist game developers, many of whom will never make enough (or anything at all, really) from their games to matter.

You want ideological purity? Go write your own system.

To be honest here. The strings that are attached are strings for people who want to sell...

Many open source projects do something like this, a dual license where the source code for the project is GPL, but the creator is willing to license it for something as non-gpl to people unwilling to release their source code.

This requirement set by unreal is very very analogous. They just have some shifted priorities, however for me this project now meets the standard of what I would consider "ethical".

Could it be better? Sure why not? It could be GPL dual license, people who want to benefit from open source but release closed source I think should have to pay, that would be better. However, this library can now be effectively used for open source initiatives. This is fantastic.

That's my estimation of the situation anyway, you perhaps do not see it like this. Could you go further into your position?

It's free as in beer, with the fine print putting a limit on the free beer you get before you're either cut off or have to start buying your own beer. It's like going to a wedding reception and claiming that the open bar is a lie because they stop serving at midnight.

It's free as in a bank loan with no time frame for repayment.

I have always believed that the base operating system, and general libraries should be Libre, but individual applications should not need to be restricted this way.

This brings the best of both worlds. Freedom in the foundations, and an incentive to have real innovation in end user apps.

But patents and copyrights should expire after ten years.

If you use it for non commercial purposes it is free enough.

It's "free" as in "fair share". You'd spend decades rebuilding something that complex - and you're welcome to do it yourself if you won't give fair reimbursement to those who did and let you use their work with no entry cost.

It appears they've backed off on the royalties, too: originally, it was 5% of gross[1], and now it's 5% of gross after $3000 sales per quarter.[2]

1 https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/welcome-to-unreal-engine-4

2 https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free

How does it fare against Unity?

My understanding, from previous versions, is that Unity offered a lot more tooling than Unreal. Also, Unreal's SDK demanded a lot of C++ code, which can be unappealing for small studios compared to Unity's Mono and several possible (managed) language choices.

However, Unreal appears to be much more capable, and better performing.

Also, is Crytek still competitive? It used to be competitive with Epic's offering, but was Windows-only.

EDIT: Unreal does have a comparison page for Unity developers: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/GettingStarted/From...

Very cool. I can now go from feeling guilty about not finishing a project in Unity Indie to feeling guilty about not finishing a project in Unreal. Seriously though, I'm kind of interested in using this as a playground for the Leap Motion SDK.

Smart. Their previous revenue model was contradictory. Now it makes sense, they want to remove all barriers for building your game on UE4, and focus on making money if you are successful.

How really easy is it to set up a beginner's project with this engine ? I mean it's a commercial engine, it has all the bells and whistles, but how easy is it to learn it ? Does it require one to use the editor to use the engine, or can I start with a simple bit of code and start going from there ?

What I hate about unity is the whole interface editor thing, it's big and you must use everything to use it. Is this Unreal Engine more earth to earth when it comes to programming ?

If it's a powerful 3D renderer but it's hard to use for simple things and it's not easily extensible, it's not really worthwhile.

I see it's very powerful, but I'm still wondering about the real utility of an "engine" versus a library.

For example, if you have some new idea and you are a programmer, and you want to be able to experiment and not be constrained by the design of the engine, I doubt such engine would really be relevant. Programmers need simple tools and frozen platforms.

I guess this engine is great for small studio who want to make a real 3D game quickly, if their programming style fit well, but if you're an indie or a demoscener and you're just experimenting, this engine is just too powerful.

I mean it's great to have such great and powerful tools (if they can last at least 5 year and not make projects obsolete) for free, but I don't see becoming a standard in the game programming community, and I don't know why...

A demo of the astounding capabilities for those who haven't seen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6PQ19BEE24

Update: think you need to register first: https://accounts.unrealengine.com/register/index

Is it just me or is the source not public yet? https://github.com/EpicGames - No public repos

https://www.unrealengine.com/ue4-on-github

For someone who's actually using UE4 as an artistic break for web dev, I thoroughly recommend it. It allows you to create great environments with beautiful lighting. 4.7 can export to HTML5 too.

Wow, this is great. I really have no excuses now to not be playing with this on my downtime.

I'm very glad of course but...

...technically all they did was lower the price by $19 a month.

...and bought a lot of press for that

...and a lot more shots at the 5% revenue.

It's really great of course. But better yet, it's really very clever.

I just subscribed two days ago. The $19 subscription fee wasn't a big deal, but even so, I now have a $30 Unreal Engine Marketplace credit.

What a great way to handle it.

It's available at no charge, but it's not free.

I'd be interested to see how the royalties work when UE for is not the primary part of the product.

Say, hypothetically you had an advanced visualisation component that you wanted to build in UE, or a virtual tour part of a much larger app. Or even using it to provide some sort of AR experience, however this was just one feature of a much much larger project, which revenues could be in the millions. Does that mean they get 5% of the whole thing? Or just the part that directly relates to the game engine?

Not knocking it, I think it's a great model, but it does make for an interesting problem. I think Unity is a better choice for this sort of scenario, of course, but still.

Nice.

Your move Unity. $4500 per seat up front or $225 per seat per month for all-platform access is looking even less appealing for small Indies.

I'm hiring a technical Product Manager to work with the Unreal Engine. E-mail me if you're interested in the space, toufique at Google's e-mail service.com

I subbed as soon as UE4 came out, and have been loving it so far. I have had extensive arguments with a fellow dev about Unity, but he has access to 5 while I don't want to pay the huge upfront cost just to have access to the same pipeline to help him, and I feel like the cost of Unity is the main barrier to me using it.

Epic is really getting ready to eat Unity's lunch I think. The graphical quality of Unity 5 is comparable, but Epic is making huge updates on short timeframes and they keep doing stuff like this.

For anyone interested, blueprints are great for prototyping, but once you have too much complexity in a BP it can easily cascade inefficiencies to the point it becomes very noticeable, so I would suggest using C++ with VS 2013 community edition, which now works with the plugin the Epic provides.

Also, there are some features that you can only access if you compile the engine yourself, so that is probably also a good idea for anyone serious about their project.

I always thought it would eventually be free, but I had never imagined it'd be so quick! This is great news for the adoption rate.

However, while I like Blueprints and hate C++, I still think it needs something in between such as Lua or C# (I'm fluent in both, both come with pro/cons)

Also, with this news I'm a bit concerned about it being free, the growth that may lead in a lot of trolling on forums and misinformation. By that I mean, if you have a financial commitment to something, you're a lot less likely going to bash it publicly since you've put your money down towards it. I hope that they can keep the quality of the community to high standards like they have, with clear questions and answers.

Is this because I now get a free proprietary game engine with every single Kickstarter game sponsoring?

About time we stop the 500 monkeys reinventing 500 wheels in parallel (at least it's concurrent monkeys, they smell nicer).

Removing most of the business complexity around licensing an engine is a big deal for small developers. This is good news.

Has anyone got it to install? I downloaded installer for Mac (57mb), and when I launch/login, it says "No Engine installed", but no links on how to install the engine. My profile has a link to download the engine, but it just downloads the installer again.

Has anybody done UE4 dev on lower-end computers? I want to make games that can run on laptops with decent integrated graphics (Iris Pro). Does UE4 allow you to turn down all the fancy effects in order to do this at 60fps?

Sigh!..they are refunding..renewed it just last week..

would love if they support WP8.1 as well..

This is such good news!!!!! I wanted to do something for VR and since I am just one dev things seemed hard doing things the native way. This just made my day.

I used to pay for UE4 and they have now provided me a 30$ coupon to use in the marketplace. 👍 Epic thinks through everything nowadays.

Awesome! I have always wanted to work on Unreal Engine 4, but have almost always been a bit skeptical on the pricing.

It's hard to compare unity and unreal. To answer the question about c++, with UE4, the blueprint system removes almost all of that. Entire games can be written in their visual programming language. I also think there are ways to use c# (https://mono-ue.github.io/), if you prefer that as well. C++ is needed if you want to extend the native classes.

Regarding the editor, unreal is pretty amazing. It really shines in the tools department. Check out the landscape editor, materials editor, and animation tools on youtube. Pretty fantastic stuff.

The game engine itself is better than unity in almost every way with a few big exceptions:

1) multiplayer map size. unity can pretty easily support large online worlds 2) support for mobile/tablets. unity is the dominant platform on those devices. 3) community support. unity has a much larger community, better documentation, and a much more populous online store (though unreal is catching up)

    Regarding the editor, unreal is pretty amazing. 

Can you even compare them :)

Evaluation of software, be it library, framework, sdk or a whole engine+tools is much much harder than writing actual software, especially when royalties, copyright and other legal issues are involved.

In reality there is no way of knowing what would do your best, so you can look at specific bad parts and take that into decision making, for example, for what I've heard (and possibly it could be wrong):

- Unity is not really good when lots of people have to edit the same files, merging is not really good, and the server option does not really cut it. (For example Quake's engine .map text files are not so bad to merge in cvs/svn/p4/etc.)

- Unreal had always had the bad "fame" of 30-only fps game, while this is okay for certain shooters, or 3rd person games, it would've never worked for "Call of Duty" where the brand was simply established with 60fps. To some people this might sound a bit pedantic, but 60fps matters! (And >60fps does not really, unless you need to swap frames for a 3D VR device of sort)

That to be said both engines surely have really good parts. From little I've explored in Unity, what got me first was the ability to extend the editor while it's running - I could add menus with functionality while it was running - this is super cool.

Unreal on the other side is well known engine with lots of people from the AAA game industry familiar with it, and while the editor might seem completely foreign to people starting in the game industry, it's pretty well known by many others (I guess they don't advertise it much).

The hidden gem of Unreal for me, was it's internal UI system, which could be used as a separate project - it has docking, controls, etc. - it might be a good replacement for Qt, MFC, wxWidgets, etc.

Check out some videos on the UE4 Blueprints system (flowchart programming). I'm pretty impressed at the product they created there, IIRC there are some games made on Blueprints alone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFZCp4xsPmo : Unreal Engine 4 Blueprints in Solus (1h)

Something that I look for when comparing tools/frameworks are the number of Stackoverflow questions and answers. http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/unity3d,unreal-e... offers a quick visualization. I may have missed a few tags, but it looks like there's a very large amount of people talking about Unity3d on Stackoverflow relative to Unreal. No wonder they want to open it up to the masses.

Of course that can be interpreted many ways (Are there active email lists? Are there active forums elsewhere?) and raises other questions (What's the best way to learn a tool/technology?) but it's at least one useful metric for checking in on my FOMO.

The graphic of the comparison page is a bit unfortunate from Unreal's POV. I get that they want the arrows to indicate "move to" as in move from Unity to Unreal. Can't help but interpret it as Unity >>> Unreal though which is probably not what they intended.

I really like this easy 5% above X model. Seems fair enough.

I'm actually super curious as to why you have that opinion, UnrealEngine has been around longer, and has always had significantly more in the way of production quality tools and features. There are certainly differences, especially when you get down into the details, but two large features Unreal has had for 10 years, shader graph tools, and animation blend trees, are either new and still painful in Unity (mechanim) or only existent as a third-party add-on (shaderforge)

I think Crytek's graphics look quite a bit better and more realistic then Unreal 4, but I don't know if the tools are just as good. Also not sure if Cryengine is competitive from a performance point of view (could be a trade-off with the better graphics).

For some developers, source access must be a huge deal over Unity free version - if you want to roll your own entity system or do a native plug... WAIT! unity 5 is now out, including all features in the unity engine for free (including native plugins), with no subscription, and entirely invalidating the premise of this comment.

My understanding is that Crytek is in some financial trouble. It would be unwise to rely on them for future support.

CryENGINE is now available as Software as a Service model. $10 a month and no royalties

If you don't need the C++ performance, my guess is it makes more sense to go with Unity and use their C# version.

I believe Crytek stepped down from the "indie" scene.

> What I hate about unity is the whole interface editor thing, it's big and you must use everything to use it. Is this Unreal Engine more earth to earth when it comes to programming ?

The programming experience in UE4 is great, but is clearly not what you are looking for. It's very opinionated, And your code very much needs to fit within it's framework.

> If it's a powerful 3D renderer but it's hard to use for simple things and it's not easily extensible, it's not really worthwhile.

It's not a powerful 3D renderer. It has a quite nice 3D renderer. But Unreal is a game engine, and must be treated as such, it's renderer isn't really modular, and if a 3D renderer is all you want, I suspect you can be better suited elsewhere.

> I see it's very powerful, but I'm still wondering about the real utility of an "engine" versus a library.

I could perhaps go through a lot of examples to help illustrate the point, but perhaps the significant amount of games that ship every year based off of Unreal Engine is better evidence that there is significant utility in the "engine"

> if you have some new idea and you are a programmer

What if you aren't a programmer, what if the idea fits within the bounds of what the engine is built to do. Certainly, there are large classes of problems that UE are poorly suited for, but there are also large classes of problems that a web browser, or even a blender are ill-suited for, use the tools when they suit your problem.

> I guess this engine is great for small studio who want to make a real 3D game quickly, if their programming style fit well, but if you're an indie or a demoscener and you're just experimenting, this engine is just too powerful.

I'd agree that this engine is poorly suited for demoscene type work, but depending on your game, UE is great for indies, and depending on what your experiment is, can be great for experimenting.... Not all experiments are technical in nature.

> but I don't see becoming a standard in the game programming community

Unreal Engine is already a standard in the game programming community, and has been for 10 or so years.

In my opinion, if you're just a hobbyist programmer who want to experiment building games on the side, it makes more sense to build your MVP demo using humble html5 canvas (I personally use pixijs, but things like threejs or whatnot might be more appropriate depending on your idea). This is because building a good indie game is a big commitment requiring lots of time (which is money), and unless you're building this game for your grandchildren, it makes sense to test the market with a MVP and try to raise money for it on a kick-starter site before you commit to building it on a powerful engine like Unreal (or Unity).

In addition, worrying about powerful graphics as an indie game dev is like worrying about distributed database scalability as a minor e-commerce startup. Your priorities are messed up and, just like how you can just get away with mysql on a free heroku instance as long as you have interesting junk to sell on your ecommerce startup, so too can you get away with a shoddy 2d engine with box2d physics as long as your story is engaging (or your mechanics are fun).

I don't have any experience on Windows, but here're my 5 cents.

>What I hate about unity is the whole interface editor thing, it's big and you must use everything to use it.

Unreal Editor is even bigger.

>...earth to earth when it comes to programming ?

~4k headers, they have their own build system. Using Xcode is not very fun, it's either indexing/compiling, or just waiting while the build system tries to decide which files were changed.

A powerful machine with SSD for Unreal is a must. Unity is not that beefy (thus responsive), but you don't get a powerful editor for materials, AI, visual scripting and so on out of the box.

Also guys at Unreal prefer new features over stability. Every release is a fight with bugs.

I think what may be missing that this is more than just a "graphics" library, and that by taking over the event loop and overall structure of the app they make it so that you can get a running game (as opposed to rendering a quad) far faster.

Game development forums are full of skeletons of people that tried to roll their own "game engine", forgetting that their goal was to make a game[1]. Unity (haven't used Unreal yet) makes it so that you can get a prototype done in less than a day. I probably looked like a kid waving my phone around like a joystick to steer my sub around a 3D ocean, changing the handling, etc. Starting with a graphics library would make that a multi-day task.

[1]: No really, when I was younger I essentially stopped working on my game and developed a fully compositing GUI/Window manager. Fun, but totally besides the point.

It has a system called Blueprints that allows you to use a node-based system so you don't have to write any code at all.

I haven't used Blueprints myself as I prefer their C++ option but I have seen a number of gamedev streams using Blueprints exclusively.

You make money with it, you give them a fair share. Entry cost is $0. They'll ignore the first $3000 gross because hassling lots of "little people" for under $150 isn't worth the hassle for anyone.

Pretty amazing, really. I've been in graphics since just drawing a line on the screen of a $6000 (2015 dollars) computer was a big deal for a beginner; now you can get a seriously robust graphics engine for no cost, develop on a week's-pay cheap computer, and publish for $50 per $1000 revenue after you make enough to bother paying for.

No reason to whine, save for the sake of whining. You can still start with gcc if you like.

ETA: per another current thread, you can get a suitable Linux workstation for $89 http://symplepc.com/blogs/news/16853255-symple-introduces-th... Tack on a USB monitor for another $89, and you can write the Next Big FPS for $178 plus 5% of meaningful revenue.

Yeah; the initial title said "is now Free", suggesting by lack of capitalization of "now" and capitalization of "Free" that it was being open-sourced. I'm glad that the edited title uses lowercase for that word.

It is free as in beer, which is the natural definition of "free" for most people.

It's free to the 99.99% of people who "have this great idea for a killer game" but never get beyond the first baby steps.

for an open source (MIT licensed) engine that also works in Linux

http://www.godotengine.org/wp/

I don't see the reason for downvotes. The parent's sentiment is pointed, but has merit. It's initially doesn't cost anything, but if you want to charge for a game, it costs you. You also don't get many freedoms along with it, you gain no rights on the code and are bound to whatever Epic comes up with later.